SEALED WITH WAX and scribbled in spidery script, the General’s letter commanded us to come swiftly, before I kill her.
In the exaggerated language of the Roman elites, I understood this to mean, My wife will not do as I ask, but my master insisted on heeding the summons.
Thick, icy rains greeted our journey. In the Doctor’s sneeze, I heard the indignation he would keep silent until he could expend it in violence, presumably upon my back.
“You said this was the road,” he accused.
The cadences of his Roman brogue were as familiar to me as the perfume of rain-soaked Caledonia. “It is. Do you not see the fort?”
The Doctor made a shelf of his hand and squinted into the bleak night. “Don’t see anything.”
I pointed. “Where the oaks are. See how the tree line slants?”
A hundred miles south, stone pillars rose out of the dirt like mountains. Lit torches burned nightly beneath wooden roofs, a beacon and a warning both. There was no such gleam here. Emperor Severus had lent his name to the sod wall that girdled Rome’s influence far into the Briton north, but there was little of glory in these ramparts.
We approached the fort in silence. Engatius did not enjoy being shown up by anyone, let alone a slave girl. He nudged his horse to a trot as soon as he glimpsed the first man-made structure — a row of wooden hovels leaning drunkenly upon each other — and pranced on ahead. Saddlebags weighted with wine and food slapped against the flanks of his white mount.
A garrison had been dispatched here in the warm summer months, when days were long and game plentiful. It was spring now and as best I could tell, the legionnaires had not finished erecting the vicus, nor bounded the stables with more than a few rickety planks. The granary was a squat stone enclosure, waist-high, lacking a roof.
I would have thought my understanding of our destination wrong, were it not for the two watchtowers overlooking the sod wall, or the praetorium between them.
Engatius dismounted into a puddle. In Calleva, where Engatius had purchased me, roads were paved and awnings shaded the doorways of the poorest homes. We would have been hard-pressed to skulk to the door of a villa without some servant to intercept us.
Here, the Doctor rapped his knuckles against the wooden door three times before there was the slightest inkling of human life.
“Who’re you?” A soldier’s silhouette filled the gap. His uniform had seen better days. Dark patches pocked the bronze plate and his woolen tunic was torn at the sleeve. Although he towered over Engatius, the grip he held on the hilt of his sword was that of a frightened recruit.
I wondered which of the North’s many dangers could instil such dread in a grown man.
“Marcus Engatius, physician and friend to your general. Is … he not here?”
One of the horses whinnied.
The soldier’s gaze locked onto mine. Contempt was the prevailing Roman sentiment for my people, but I saw surprise in the legionnaire’s eyes, as though he could not fathom what might bring a plainly Pictish woman back to her ancestral home.
“May we come in?” Engatius entreated, shivering at our host. “We’ve been riding with the rain for days.”
That broke the soldier’s fascination with me. He welcomed the Doctor inside and directed me to the stables.
As soon as the door swung shut, I led the horses around the villa and freed them of their saddlebags behind a small shed. A wooden plank kept the worst of the rain from their heads. Damp scrub grass would do to feed them.
I wanted the animals near. Something about this thick, oppressive night made me both anxious and excited. This was the closest I’d come to the Highlands since I was a girl. I could all but smell the pine and heather.
Inside the villa, a different scent pervaded — that of corruption and death.
Calleva had accustomed me to scores of slaves bustling in and out of kitchens, baths and bedchambers. Their absence spiked my pulse. I took stock of the foursome of soldiers in the atrium and felt their eyes creep down my body with equal circumspection.
Just as I gathered my courage to ask where I might find my master, Engatius’ voice echoed through the silent villa.
“Seonag, I need you!”
Relief washed over me. I tracked the Doctor’s inimitable timbre through the tablinum with its carved writing tables and padded stools. The courtyard beyond it was striated with the shadow of sandstone colonnades, yet the fish ponds reflected only darkness, a faint flicker of movement trapped in the shimmering pools.
Weighted down with our saddlebags, I shambled awkwardly across the tile floor, momentum carrying me past the bedchamber door before I could ask permission.
“Stop right there,” a stern voice reprimanded.
The brutal slam of a wide palm to my ribcage halted me in my tracks. Its owner glared with brown eyes set in a scarred, indubitably Roman face.
“Let her through, General,” Engatius urged. “She has my potions. Your wife needs smelling salts. Has she been ill long?”
“Every night since ….” The Roman caught himself. “Yes, a while. The trance takes her at midnight.”
At once forgotten, I skirted around the General to bring my master his medicaments.
The bedchamber was a small room with a wide entrance and a vaulted ceiling. A bedroll in the entryway told me a slave had been assigned to the General’s wife. There was no trace of her now. The mistress of the house lay on the bed, her eyes moving rapidly behind closed lids.
“Spirit of Hartshorn,” the Doctor told me sharply.
I rummaged through the bags, my fingers combing through powdered lemon plant, rose petals soaked in wine, dried laurel, poppy seeds, aniseed to treat the bite of a scorpion — and yes, finally, the blue vial of liquid Hartshorn.
Marcus snatched it from my hand and uncorked the concoction. He was comparatively tender with the General’s wife, holding her head up so she might inhale.
Her nostrils flared.
The General cleared his throat. “They tell me sometimes, she wakes in a cold sweat. Sometimes, not at all.”
“‘They?’” I repeated, before I could quell the impulse.
The furrow between the General’s brows deepened. “The slaves.”
“Have they abandoned you?”
He crossed his arms across a barrel chest. “Is this relevant?”
“I think she’s coming around,” announced Engatius, in a tremulous voice.
Indeed, the General’s wife blinked her eyes open with some effort. Her sinister kohl-black gaze found mine first, then her husband’s.
“I’m a doctor, my lady,” said Engatius. “General Antonius sent for me.”
“Have you told them?”
The General huffed out a breath. “That you talk nonsense? No, of course not. The doctor will give you something for the road. We leave by first light.”
Astride a horse? I thought. Again? Fatigue slumped my shoulders, but I knew better than to protest. We had ridden far to tend a woman who seemed in fair health — if slightly cross with her husband.
I had been wrong to trust old prophecy. The spirits in these woods did not take kindly to tainted blood.
My master sighed and nodded. “Can you tell me what ails you, sweet lady?”
“My name,” said the general’s wife, “is Iunia Gratiana.” She pushed herself upright, folding pale legs beneath the hem of a sheer-white shift. “And I do not wish to leave this place.”
“Iuno Sospita!” The General strode forward, his jaw clenched. “Whatever daemon you hold inside you, the doctor will pry out.”
With limp, sweat-soaked black hair sticking out at odd angles and bags drooping beneath her eyes, Gratiana thrust out her chin as defiant as a queen. “And if he cannot?”
“Then I will do it myself!”
I flinched, all-too-familiar with the Roman appetite for threats.
The unyielding tension between husband and wife was quelled by the sudden blare of a horn.
Engatius looked up from where he was rifling for some miracle cure. “What’s that?”
“Barbarians,” spat the General. “Have her ready for the road!” Fury twisted at his mouth as he whirled around and left us.
“My husband speaks to you as a friend,” Gratiana observed.
“We, ah, had the good fortune to study under the same tutor in Calleva.” Engatius shot a wary glance to the door. He’d never been in a battle, let alone so far from Hadrian’s Wall. Naked fear shone on his wrinkled face.
Gratiana slid back to the sleeping couch with a huff of laughter. “Fortune! This place has not known any in a year.”
“You’ve suffered many attacks?”
“The tribes harass us. They steal cattle and horses.”
Engatius bid me upend a vial of tonic into a cup of wine. “I see the people have fled. No one is left but for you and the garrison —”
“Yes, five souls and my indomitable husband.”
Gratiana turned her head on the cushion. I had the uncanny feeling that she was following me with her gaze, a yellow flicker in her eyes.
When I chanced a look, I discovered her peering at the ceiling.
“My husband led a skirmish into the oak wood, you see. Two hundred perished, but he returned. I saved him … and this is how he repays me.” She rose up onto her elbows. “He turned my son away when he was born. Such a small, fragile parcel of life. I laid him at his feet and he said, The eyes aren’t mine. Now our son sleeps with the spirits of the forest and my husband wages war, and I do not wish to leave!”
I shivered, though the elaborate brazier in the room tinged the air with a warm glow.
Engatius blew into a clump of burnt rosemary to dim the embers. The pungent scent filled the room like incense. “For purification,” he explained.
He wasn’t truly listening to the General’s wife, but I was. Curiosity got the better of me.
“How did you save him?”
Gratiana met my gaze. “A pact with the wood. My husband’s life for our eternal gratitude … as though that might slake its hunger!” She laughed hoarsely. “You believe in daemons, don’t you?”
“She is a simple girl,” scoffed my master. “She is seduced by simple superstition.”
“Is it superstition if I say you may not see morning, Doctore?”
Marcus nearly dropped the rosemary. “Surely, the barbarians cannot penetrate these walls ….” This villa was Rome and Rome was eternal.
“It is not barbarians you should fear,” Gratiana informed us. With a careless hand, she snatched the goblet from my grasp and downed its contents in a single swig.
Crimson dregs spilled onto her shift as she collapsed, as though even this small effort had exhausted her. The bed gave a small, disconsolate groan.
I hunted for my customary scorn and found none. The blare of the horn had given way to the sounds of battle, which ricocheted from the walls of the villa like stray arrows.
“That was no tonic,” I murmured, wounded.
Engatius gave a careless wave. “A soporific to clear her mind. She will be restored when next she wakes.” He had roused the General’s wife from her strange torpor only to medicate her into another unnatural sleep.
Gratiana had struck me as perfectly lucid, but the Doctor’s judgment was the only one that mattered. I left him to his task, creeping out of the bedchamber on cat-quiet feet.
Rain spattered the ground, but the rattle of the downpour was not enough to disguise the beastlike howl of warriors. My heart swelled.
I remembered their cries. The music of their battle. I was home.
Fishhooks snagged in my flesh with the sudden urge to find the nearest door and run, to join them and disappear into the oak wood with the daemons. I took my first step to the baths.
Something tumbled from the roof of the villa. A soldier, my addled mind supplied. His skull shattered upon impact with the tile walkway at my feet, helmet rolling into the azaleas.
I stumbled, yearning curdling in my gut. Before I made it more than a pace, my shoulder was seized.
“How dare you disrespect me so before the General? I should whip you ….” The Doctor’s gaze ticked down, past me, to the body in the garden. “Gods above ….”
“Above is Rome,” intoned a fearsome voice. The General’s shoulders stooped as he stepped into the light, a bull bracing for a fight.
Were it not for the breathless heave of his plated chest, I might not have guessed he’d been in a battle at all.
“And that man was a coward.”
“He fell,” I protested.
“He jumped. The North acquaints men with their fear.”
Marcus shook himself. “But — what of the battle?”
“Won.”
“So soon?”
The smile on General Antonius’ mouth was cruel. “Vermin dare not approach this house. Hallowed ground, my wife calls it. Speaking of whom ….”
“Sh-she will be well enough to travel by morning. The potion I administered will help.” When he spoke, the Doctor’s voice shook badly. He had yet to look away from the corpse.
Noticing this, the General gestured to two of his men to tend to their fallen brother.
“Good. Then you will take the adjoining bedchamber and rest. We leave at first light.”
I waited for my master to ask how many of my own people had died, how many lay wounded in the fields outside the settlement, but he did not.
He seemed so eager to leave that I wondered if we should have come at all.
That night, Engatius snored blissfully on the sleeping couch, impervious to our eerie surroundings.
The steady rise and fall of his chest filled me with aggravation. While the Doctor drifted off into the arms of Morpheus, I was charged with keeping watch. There was no telling my master that I was ill-suited to the task, or that I jumped at every shadow.
Once, a crow alighted on the lip of the ornate fountain at the heart of the peristylium and I slammed my head against the wall in fright.
I rubbed the tender spot, keeping the pain alive, and strained my ears.
Gratiana’s words rang in my skull like the echo of a howl in a cave. Did I believe her? Yellow-eyed daemons suited the legends of my childhood and I could not shake the feeling that more than foul weather and barbarian skirmishes were at play here.
A rustle of movement pricked my ears. I dug my knuckles into the bedroll and shifted my weight. I was uneasy around soldiers, but with only a handful left, I doubted they’d venture far from their post to seek me out.
The shadow of a man drew itself sharp onto the tiled floors, putting paid to my hopes.
I flattened my back to the wall, blood pulsing in my temples, and fumbled for my short dagger, the only weapon Engatius permitted me when we were away from home.
An hour or an instant passed as I waited to be attacked or ravished, Roman impunity sure to prevail on my innocence. It took what little courage I had left to chance another glance into the courtyard.
My gaze found the figure at once. It was shambling away, gliding more than walking, a sword held aloft.
The guardsman in the atrium must have sensed the same frisson I had. He squinted into the shadows between the colonnades, features smoothing into a mask of recognition when he made out the source of the disturbance.
“Oh, it’s you —”
The shade drew back its gladius and swung it in a clean, decisive arc.
I buried a shriek into my palm.
Swords killed. That much I knew from the day my village was attacked. But it had been years since I’d witnessed their prowess. I could not look away. Blood spurted from the soldier’s throat, spattering painted tile and staining his uniform. He was beyond caring, a nearly headless amalgamation of raw meat and split skin, bone protruding glaringly from his jaw.
The figure stood over him a moment, naked hunger in its gaze. Though my vision was unimpeded, I could hardly make out its features. It was not human. It could not be. Yet, as I watched, it crouched down with a creak of human knees and reached a long-fingered hand into the soldier’s face.
My gut churned.
The jelly-white of human eyes gleamed in the moonlight, lustrous like marbles. Gratiana’s opium-addled blather slammed into me with startling clarity.
He said the eyes aren’t mine.
As I looked on, the swordsman brought first one eye and then the other to his mouth, and bit down as though into a grape. Then, satisfied, he rose and turned his steps to the front of the house.
I was paralyzed with fright, but knew I had to move — now and quickly, before the creature returned. I stood on shaking knees, half-stumbling and half-bolting the short distance to the Doctor’s bed.
“Master. Master, wake up ….”
He mumbled something indistinct and batted at my shaking hands.
I knew I would regret my impudence tomorrow, but in that moment it seemed desperately more important to rouse him. With trembling fingers, I pinched his nostrils together, the way my mother would do to my siblings and I when we were small.
His eyes fluttered open. “What ….”
“We must go,” I gritted out. “Now. The General —”
Before another word could pass my lips, the villa erupted with a shrill and sudden bellow. It was a cry of anguish. Another guard dead, I thought, reaching for the Doctor’s arm.
He shook me off. “What — are we under attack?”
“No, no … it’s the daemon.” I hadn’t allowed myself to think it before, but deep in my heart, I knew.
The creature that fed on the soldier’s eyes was not of this world. Gratiana had tried to warn us. I spared a thought for the General’s wife as I grabbed for the Doctor’s satchels, loading myself with his surgical equipment and herbal potions. Once we escaped, we would not be returning to the villa, for Gratiana or anyone else.
I knew the stories too well.
“That’s not — there are no such things as daemons,” Engatius insisted.
A second cry rippled through the villa. I flung a desperate, searching glance at my master. How could a man of such learning be so obtuse?
“I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Then we must find the General.” He was up in a heartbeat, moving with swiftness that belied his age.
“There is no time!”
“He’s a friend,” the Doctor shot back. He shook off my grip when I seized hold of his sleeve, rounding on me with a snarl and a raised hand.
The slap snapped my head to the side. Heat spread down my neck and collarbone, sunk its claws deep into the cage of my ribs.
“He’s a dead man!” I gritted out.
But it was too late. The Doctor turned for the door that led into Gratiana’s cubiculum, the beaded curtain that separated our bedchamber from the procoeton jangling like a wind chime.
My master and I had little in common beyond a mutual hatred, but without his Roman protection, I would be another runaway Pictish slave and Rome’s reach could be long in these parts.
I swore and followed him through the stooped doorway.
“This is madness,” I snarled, a complaint that fell on deaf ears.
Just three feet into the General’s bedchamber, Engatius stood unmoving. Between his old friend and him lay Gratiana’s ornate sleeping couch. The woman herself was held at sword point.
“General,” Engatius began haltingly. “Antonius, what —”
“She killed them! Every single one. All the soldiers, all the villagers ….” The General’s forearm bulged with the effort of holding a blade to his wife’s throat. His knuckles whitened around the hilt. “She made a pact with the di inferi! She is Discordia-made-flesh!”
“She is your wife.”
“Husband ….” Tears beaded on Gratiana’s spidery lashes.
I squeezed my fist around my dagger. Small as it was, it was our only hope.
“Silence!” The General’s fury sparked like a flint. “Your poison tongue has taken two hundred lives! All my nightmares, all those unanswered questions — it was your doing! I should have slit your throat when you brought that thing into the world! Mothers of good Roman legionnaires rejoice! The gods themselves would welcome me into Elysium!”
Engatius inched forward. “Antonius, are — are you injured?”
“What?”
“Your hands. You — is that blood?”
The General blinked at him, bemused. His hold on Gratiana slackened. “It … it happened again.” He grimaced, shaking as if in the throes of a seizure, and abruptly doubled over.
As a doctor’s servant, I had witnessed patients expel the contents of their stomach before, but never had their bile contained human eyes, half-digested, yet still distinct on white linen.
“Antonius!”
My master started forward with arms outstretched, heedless of the offal on the bed. He blocked my view of the General but not of his sword.
The gladius did not stave him off, though it sank deep into his gut and emerged through the slats of his spine like a needle perforating cloth. A red flower bloomed in its wake.
Engatius buckled, his unbelted tunic catching on the blade. He folded gently.
The General’s face floated above him, blood around the mouth and eyes wide.
I did not think. I hefted my dagger and lobbed it with as much force as I could muster.
Had he worn his plate, the short blade would not have made a dent. Had he woken from his nightmares and come for me rather than the Roman guards standing watch, I would not have been here, now, to pierce his chest. But he had not.
The General crumpled like a puppet, his frown giving way to astonishment. He was not so invincible, after all, if a mere slave — a woman, at that — could fell him with a single blow.
Gratiana crawled away from her husband’s body and dragged herself up with both hands upon the soiled bed. She seemed no more eager to approach his body than I was to check if the Doctor was still breathing.
“It’s over,” I said, swallowing past the lump in my throat.
“Yes.”
“Can you ride? We should ….” Leave this place. Flee whatever darkness hangs upon this house. The General was gone, but the forces that had animated his mortal coil still hovered in the air around us. I could hear their whispers. I sensed their bodies rustling in the shadows.
My fear was Roman, but something inside me was awed by such horrific power.
I thought that the General’s wife might refuse. She’d said before she did not wish to leave this house. But Gratiana nodded, her lips curling in distaste as she took in the sprawl of our two masters — Roman, proud and very much dead.
“Yes,” she said again and only briefly hesitated before taking my arm. She seemed stricken, but not out of her mind with grief, as I helped her astride Engatius’ white charger. “Where will we go, Seonag? What are we to do?”
“South.”
Hadrian’s Wall would be our destination for the time being and then, who could say? Calleva? Londinium? As for what to do — I cast one last glance over the lugubrious villa, its walls stooped and dark against the shuddering oak wood.
Something had been awakened in this forest, born of Gratiana’s sacrifice and hatred, an ancient power that stole through the General and turned Rome’s sharpest weapon against itself.
“Does it still hunger?” I asked, scratching my hand into the steed’s snowy hair.
Iunia Gratiana offered a thin smile.
“South,” I repeated. South to Rome itself, to the stretch of a prosperous empire reclining upon stolen land, full of men whose dreams were ripe for plucking like eyes from a human skull.